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CryptoPhone Sales Jump To 100,000+, Even at $3500
An anonymous reader writes "Since Edward Snowden started making NSA files public last year, GSMK has seen a jump in sales. There are more than 100,000 CryptoPhones in use today. How secure they really are will be determined in the future. But I'm sure that some government agencies, not just in the U.S., are very interested in getting a list of users."
For the price the company's charging for a modified Galaxy S3, it had better be as secure as they claim; otherwise, the free and open source RedPhone from Moxie Marlinspike's Whisper Systems seems like something to think about first.
Pull the other one... A phone has more than one chip in it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
$3500 is a lot to spend on software
...Blackphone?
Then rest assured that governments know how to get into them. Else we'd have seen some kind of harebrained reason why these phones can no longer be bought and used.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At least it's not from a US company. There is another phone like this, and it's from a US based company. And I'm thinking... yeah right, NSA honey trap.
We need secure software. We cant trust hardware at all, unless it's for a single purpose, with a verifiable protocol. The Bitcoin community are coming up with some great solutions, which will help.
I've said it before on the topic and I'll say it again. One word: Honeypot.
I laugh hysterically at people who fork over thousands of dollars to admit they have something to hide and lead the watchers right to them.
It would be naïve to think that with all of the massive crytographic resources at their disposal, the NSA can't hack into this phone's communications at the push of a button.
With something like RedPhone is that there are multiple CPUs on the phone -- in particular, the base-band is a full ARM chip with complete access to all ram on the device. And the software running there is almost never under the users control. So it doesn't matter how good red-phone is -- if it ever leaks *any* plaintext or key bits out to ram, or across any wires outside the cpu it's running on, the baseband chip and the software running on it can wiretap you. And even if those things never leak off the main cpu die, the baseband can probably inject processes/instructions into that main chip's address space that would steal those critical key bits.
Unless you have control over *all* the firmware running on *all* the processors in a phone, I wouldn't trust it any farther than I can comfortably spit out a rat.
(and this is not accounting for hardware tricks -- I think you cannot trust your communications are secure unless you trust everyone involved in its design, manufacture and programming (including the compiler and related toolchain, and its compiler and toolchain -- and so on ad-infinitum) -- and that is probably a *very* sizable list indeed -- the odds that some lettered agency (looking at *you* cse/csis, nsa, gchq, fsb, etc) have not corrupted *someone* on that large list are so small that only god/fsm could tell the difference between it and 0.)
Ian Ameline
Go to the stadium in shorts and t-shirt, freshly washed (and dried indoors). Wear new style running shoes with very thin sole, as recommended in Scott Jurek's "Eat and run".
Talk while walking via woods or a park, among trees.
Not phone, no watch, no camera, no heavy clothing.
And speak quietly anyway. Still it does not guarantee privacy.
All other talk or messaging are public. It is a new brave world where there are no secrets.
At $3500 a pop, I expect it's the NSA (or another 3-4 letter agency) who've bought most of these phones.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
While the vast majority of people do not use cryptography on all their communications those who do will be noticed and put under greater scrutiny therefore in being proactive they have made themselves a target protected only by the assumption that the technology they are employing does not contained flaws know to those who wish to monitor them, a very foolish assumption.
Showden el al have done the NSA (and similar organisations in every other government) a favour by motivating targets to "break cover" while not actually providing them with any real protection. Even if I can't break your shine new phone protecting now I can still put an old school bug in your physical location now that I know I need to target you. Or arrange for you to acquire an attractive new friend with a lot if common interests etc. Old school methods become efficient on a large scale if the targets do you the favour of identifying themselves because your efforts can be much more focused.
Isn't there a software stack for encrypted comm?
Slashdot seems to be asleep when it comes to new security products, especially when its a Phil Zimmerman venture and the phone only costs about what an iPhone does.